USA > Pennsylvania > Chronicles of Pennsylvania from the English revolution to the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1688-1748, Vol. II > Part 7
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141892
It was in the days of Gookin's successor, Keith, that the German influx into Pennsylvania became so great as to cause embarrassment. By Sep. 17, 1717, there had recently arrived from London, distributed in three vessels, 363 foreigners from Germany generally spoken of as Palatines, without anything like credentials, and apparently having first landed in England, and left it without even the knowledge of the government there. They had dispersed through the province without mak- ing any application to the Lieutenant-Governor or any of the magistrates. The Lieutenant-Governor there- fore on that day raised the question how far this could be allowed with safety, as enemies might so introduce themselves. So an order was made in Council that the masters of the vessels appear, and give an account of the passengers. The passengers were ordered by proc- lamation to give assurance by oaths before the Recorder of Philadelphia of their being well affected to the King, such as were Mennonites, however, being allowed, in- stead of taking an oath, to give equivalent assurances in their own way.
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The immigration in strong force was kept up for years with increasing numbers, Jonathan Dickinson in 1719 speaking of ships being expected from London bringing 6000 or 7000 Palatinates.
A sect which has lasted in Pennsylvania to the pres- ent day, and has spread through the United States, dates in the former from this same year, 1719. Then, as we learn from Sachse's German Sectarians, there arrived about twenty families of a Baptist congrega- tion at Crefeld, formed in the house of Alexander Mack by refugees from Schwarzenau. Mack, who hailed from Schriesheim in the Palatinate, followed these as- sociates to Pennsylvania. They differed from the Mennonites by insisting upon immersion, and, with other sectaries of similar practice, but independent of these ecclesiastically, were called Tunkers. From these immigrants and their early converts has grown the large denomination generally in America called Dunk- ards, but using as the official name "the Brethren."
Johann Conrad (or Conrad) Beissel came to Ger- mantown in 1720 as one of a company of mystical Pietists from the Palatinate intending to join the "chapter of perfection" on the Wissahickon. Finding it broken up, he and two or three others retired to the Conestoga region. In 1724, he was immersed by the Dunkards, and became head of their small Conestoga congregation then formed. Beissel and his fellow hermits, having previously become convinced of the obligation to keep Saturday as the Sabbath and day of worship, instead of Sunday, soon brought the con- gregation to their view. Breaking off from the other Dunkards, whose headquarters were at Germantown, the "Beisselianer," as these original German Seventh Day Brethren were called, undertook, by the following very remarkable performance, to renounce the baptism received at the hands of those who kept Sunday, viz: the Beisselianer immersed one another backwards
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thrice; and thereupon, so that there should be a bap- tism, they immersed forwards thrice. Gradually this congregation adopted a dress marking a distinction from the Quakers and other plainly dressed religionists. The men wore their hair and beards of whatever length they would grow, and went barefoot when the weather permitted.
After a while, Beissel resigned as Vorsteher; and he and others carried out in huts on the Cocalico the old intention of leading a solitary life in retirement. In 1735, building at a place named by them Ephrata, they changed into communities, the women as the Order of the Spiritual Virgins, in a house called Kedar, and the men in a camp, and sometimes in cells in the house built for worship. Thus Pennsylvania had an order- not Roman Catholic or Greek, but Seventh Day Bap- tist-of nuns, dressed in unbleached linen or wool, hooded with gown and apron like a scapulary, and also an order of monks of the same outward religion, long- haired, bearded, barefooted or sandaled, dressed also in unbleached linen or wool, cowled, with gowns like the women's. For a time, the secular persons of this Seventh Day Baptist congregation wore gray gowns. In 1736, upon the arrest of six of the monks for refus- ing to pay the tax on men without property, they claim- ing that they were one family, to be assessed according to the worldly possessions of the community, it was de- cided by the government to accept 40s., in the nature of a tax on the estate, as the full amount due from the community. In Sachse's German Sectarians will be found an account of the extravagancies, to use a mild expression, of the male members, combining with the general faith of Dunkards strange beliefs, among which Millenarianism was the least strange, and astrology was often included. Beissel, their Superintendent, was credited by them with magical powers. Those who gathered as the Zionitic Brotherhood, for whom a house
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called Zion was built, practised a long course of initia- tion so dangerous to brain and body that they should have been restrained in a prison or madhouse. In 1741, a house of prayer, Peniel, for the women was com- pleted: when Sachse wrote, it was standing as the church of the German Seventh Day Baptist Congrega- tion of Ephrata. The nuns were afterwards accommo- dated in a house called Saron, and were called Roses of Saron. Largely through the exertions of the Ecker- ling brothers from Alsatia, one of whom, Israel, was Prior, the community engaged in several industries, supporting its members, and bidding fair to amass wealth, which Beissel deprecated. Beissel for a while lost both his power and his office of Superintendent, but afterwards overthrew the Eckerlings, deposing the Prior, and bringing about the retirement of some of the Zionitic brethren to the wilds of mountainous Vir- ginia, and the decline of the Brotherhood of Zion.
A few sympathizers copied the Ephrata monks and nuns by retiring from the village of Germantown, and, for a short time, beginning in the Summer or Fall of 1737, living in a log house, which was called the Kloster, in a secluded vale near the Wissahickon. The stone mansion built on the site after they left it, was long known as the Monastery, and figures in fiction.
A large body of Palatinates had been sent by Queen Anne to New York to engage in furnishing the English government with naval stores, in consideration whereof, after the expense should have been repaid by their labor, they were to have £5 and 40 acres per family on the Schoharie Creek. They arrived in New York through May, June, and July, 1710. The majority were placed on Robert Livingston's manor on the Hud- son, but became discontented, and seven hundred re- moved to the Schoharie in 1712. From the land which they there occupied, they were mostly being evicted- they stating their confinement in New York to 10 acres
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per family-when Lt. Gov. Keith of Pennsylvania en- couraged these unfortunates to move to the vacant land on the frontier of his province. An affidavit, made on Oct. 22, 1726, by Godfrey Fidler, signer of the petition about to be mentioned, is printed with an account of the Indian treaty of June, 1728. The affidavit says that a fellow countryman, Hans Lawyer (sic), went to Phila- delphia, and asked the Governor for a tract. Being told to look for one, Lawyer went home, and brought four others to make the inspection, and the Tulpehocken region was selected. Subsequently, Keith being at Albany for the treaty of 1722 (see chapter on the Irish and their Kirk), George Haine and another Palatinate had an interview with him, and reported to those who sent them his encouragement for forty or fifty families to come. The Palatinates cut a road from the Schoharie to the Susquehanna, and built canoes, the neighbouring Indians being friendly; and, in the Spring of 1723, there began the movement down the North Branch, and then down the main Susquehanna, to the mouth of the Swatara, and up that creek, and thence across land to the Tulpehocken region. Some goods and some cattle were brought, the cattle, Weiser says, being driven over land. James Mitchell of Donegal, by letter of May 13, 1723, reported fifteen families having gone up the creek, and the upper savages protesting against such settlement in their territory, and being impatient for an explanation. The aforesaid affidavit says that some families made a stop on the Susquehanna, but Keith sent the immigrants word to settle closer to- gether, as likely so to give less uneasiness to the Indians. A petition of which the date is not given, evi- dently drawn up by Keith, although addressed to him and the Council, purporting to come from thirty-three families who had arrived the year before, and signed by fifteen men, said that they had been permitted by Governor Keith to settle on the Tulpahaca Creek, the
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most distant frontier, on condition that they make full satisfaction to the Proprietor or his agents for the land, when they should be ready to receive the same. The petitioners prayed, that, upon paying the usual prices for lands at such a distance, they might have titles made to them for such lands as they should have occa- sion to buy, and be free from the demands of the Indians in that part of the country who pretend a right. It was added that on the same terms fifty more families would come. The petition, on being presented, Feb. 10, 1724-25, was referred to Logan and the others in- vested with the power to sell and convey land.
Not only were the Indians in discontent, partly neces- sitating the treaty of June, 1728, which will be men- tioned in a later chapter, but the enjoyment of Lætitia Aubrey's devise became affected (see chapter on Con- fusion at the Death of Penn). As these Palatinates had furnished New York with some troops for the war, had required on Livingston manor soldiers to overawe them, and seemed ready to defend themselves in Penn- sylvania from being driven off the land they had offered to buy, we may conclude that there were practically no Mennonites among those who came in 1723, or those who in 1728 and 1729 followed them. We are led to suppose that Lutherans predominated; for the log house of worship put up at Tulpehocken in 1727 is ex- pressly stated by Conrad Weiser Jr., who came in 1729, to have been built by the Lutherans, but also to have been attended by some Reformed. While these com- panies were arriving on the Tulpehocken, there was the starting in the province of congregations of both denominations, as well as the advent of a great multi- tude speaking the German language.
The Reformed emerged from the Presbyterian body in the gathering of the Reformed who were of Dutch race, under, to be sure, a German preacher, but ulti- mately in such relations with their kindred in New York
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as to make all non-British Calvinists part of the Re- formed Dutch Church. It has not been made sufficiently plain in Rev. Dr. Joseph H. Dubbs's History of the Reformed Church in Pennsylvania that the first steps were practically a secession of certain inhabitants of Dutch origin from the Presbyterian fold to their Na- tional Church. Those too far away to make use of the ministrations of any Presbyterian clergyman, except on rare occasions, had for some time held local meet- ings, with such neighbours as sympathized with them, for prayer and the reading, by a lay reader, of a ser- mon in the language which they understood. Those northwest of Germantown who had been going to the Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia for communion, decided, in 1725, to organize themselves as a part of the Dutch Reformed body, and insisted upon their reader, John Philip Boehm, a native of Hanau, per- forming the entire office of Pastor without waiting for ordination. They adopted a constitution, arranging themselves in three congregations, viz : Falkner Swamp (New Hanover Township), Skippack, and White- marsh; and Boehm administered communion in the latter part of the year in those congregations to 100 members in all. His services extended to the younger settlements : a congregation was formed at Conestoga, and there on Oct. 14, 1727, he administered communion to 59 members, and at Tulpehocken on the 18th of that month to 32 persons.
In 1727, we find the mention of ships starting from Holland, although stopping at some port in England, bringing large numbers of Palatines. On Sep. 14, 1727, Keith's successor, Gordon, speaking of the arrival of four hundred in one ship, the expectation of more, their design to settle in the back parts of the province, and the want of a license or notice to the Proprietaries or their representatives, expressed a fear of so many "daily poured in," who, ignorant of the language and
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laws, made "a distinct people from his Majesty's sub- jects." The Council decided to exact an oath &ct., similar to that of Keith's time, until a remedy could be obtained from the English government to prevent the importation of so many into the American colonies. The Council's minutes give a list of those, being all the males over sixteen, appearing before it, and taking the oath &ct., beginning on Sep. 27, 1727. The list, with corrections and appendices, has been printed by Rupp in Collection of upwards of Thirty Thousand Names of Immigrants in Pennsylvania from 1727 to 1776.
By November, 1727, according to a letter from Logan, there were many thousand foreigners, mostly Palati- nates, in the colony, nearly 1500 having come in the past Summer. He described them as a surly people, with the men generally well armed; and he said that there were some Papists in the number. Possibly that was so, although there is no sign of them until later. Keith had refused to require a religious test of the immigrants. As to those from the Rhine who had landed in England in Queen Anne's time, such as were ascertained to be Roman Catholics were sent back.
The sons of Penn by his second wife, when taking hold of the affairs of Pennsylvania and Delaware, re- quested the Lieutenant-Governor to get an act passed by the Assembly of the Province proper to deter such further immigration of the Palatinates as might be dangerous or disadvantageous : but this was not done. Although slackening at times, the great influx contin- ued through the period of these Chronicles, the arrivals at the port of Philadelphia for 1748 and a few years preceding averaging over 1000 annually, while in 1749 they numbered 8778.
In the ship which caused the aforesaid proceeding of Gordon and his Council, came the German Reformed Church; not the first person who had been brought up
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within it, nor the first person who had been ordained by it, but the first minister sent over with a recognized charge, and, as far as known, the first laymen not to put themselves under a different jurisdiction upon ar- rival. Heading the list of those appearing before the Council on Sep. 27, 1727, was Rev. George Michael Weiss, ordained by the Upper Consistory of the Pal- atinate, and sent as Pastor of such of the company as started from that district. He organized a congre- gation of such of them as stayed in Philadelphia, the elders being Peter Lecolie (who perhaps had been a Walloon), John William Roerig, Henry Weller, and George Peter Hillegass. Weiss also ministered to those who went towards the Conestoga, and at New Goshen- hoppen, where he made his residence with Hillegass's brother.
Weiss, learning that Boehm had not been ordained, denied his ministerial capacity, and summoned him be- fore the English-speaking Presbytery of Philadelphia; whereupon application to remedy the defect was made to the Reformed Classis of Amsterdam. By direction received in due time from said Classis, Boehm was or- dained Pastor of Falkner Swamp, Skippack, and White- marsh on Nov. 23, 1729, at New York, by Rev. Gualther Du Bois of New York, Rev. Henry Boel of New York, and Rev. Vincent Antonides of Long Island; where- upon Weiss recognized Boehm as such Pastor.
Meanwhile, Rev. John Bartholomew Rieger, who had been ordained in the Palatinate, had come over to Penn- sylvania. In 1729, he took the care of the Reformed at Lancaster, which he kept until 1743, some time also preaching at other places. Rev. Caspar Ludwig Schnorr appears subsequently as Pastor of the Re- formed at Lancaster.
The opulence of the Reformed in Holland led the Reformed elsewhere to appeal to them for aid. Weiss went to Europe in 1730 to raise money, and a consider-
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able sum was collected in Holland. After his return to America, he spent some years in the province of New York, but finally resumed care of the New Goshen- hoppen neighbourhood. In 1730, John Peter Miller, a native of the Palatinate, supplied the Philadelphia Church, receiving ordination from the Philadelphia Presbytery, and, in 1731, he became Pastor at Tulpe- hocken, being succeeded at Philadelphia by Rieger. Miller joined the Dunkards, taking with him a number both of the Reformed and of Lutherans. Boehm re- sumed charge of Tulpehocken and Moden Crik Re- formed. Sachse tells us that Weiser, who had become a Dunkard, and, when such, was appointed a Justice of the Peace, met Pastor Boehm on horseback soon after- wards, and twitted Boehm with trying to be above his Master, in riding a horse instead of an ass. Boehm replied that he was obliged to take a horse, as the Gov- ernor had appointed the ass as a Justice. For a time, Schnorr served Tulpehocken.
The Reformed at Philadelphia in 1734 unanimously called Boehm, who served them long but intermittently. In the Summer of that year, they accepted the con- stitution of his original congregations, practically put- ting themselves under Dutch jurisdiction. They rented from Andrew Hamilton a stable or butchering-place for a number of years. The Proprietaries about 1741 sold to them a lot on Vine Street, within the present limits of Franklin Square, which they began using as a burial ground, but which long afterwards was lost by a decision that the five squares set apart by William Penn were public property.
Independence-too often rivalry-of Boehm was maintained, and at the same time independence of Dutch help or supervision, in some German neighbour- hoods, as at Lancaster, and in Germantown, at which place from 1726 John Bechtel, without ordination, led religious meetings, and in 1733 a church edifice was
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built. The people of Neshaminy in 1730 applied to Holland for a Pastor, and Peter Heinrich Dorsius, being ordained as such, served from 1737 to 1748, bear- ing for a while the office of Inspector.
The principles of the Lutheran faith, which has dealt with theology, and not with polity, have in Europe made ministers largely officers of secular government, and have not insisted upon holy orders for the con- ducting of worship. Consistently with the same, the Swedish clergy on the Delaware did what they could, as has been indicated, for those inhabitants of other race who desired their services, but made no claim that their own Church was the legitimate branch of the Universal Church for the region, and, far from having any jealousy of other preachers of Lutheranism, were inclined to let the Lutherans from the Continent of Europe organize, and take care of themselves. It was the wish of the latter to be supplied by competent ministers picked out and certified to them by Lutherans of high reputation on the other side of the Atlantic, such, for instance, as the Consistory of some well known part of Germany, the Consistory at Amsterdam, the Halle professors, or the Lutheran Chaplains in London. Meanwhile were accepted wandering preachers who could not get employment at home, some of them being unworthy characters such as other denominations in the American colonies found among their clergy, some of them even false claimants to having received the ceremony of ordination. Yet the party feeling among a class where the "solid" reading was theological, and the gossip of a neighbourhood where the preacher's visit was the great event, have doubtless made out some clergymen worse than they were.
Johann Caspar Stoever Jr., native of Luedorff, Duchy of Berg, Unter Pfaltz, a theological candidate, licensed to preach, arriving in Philadelphia in Septem- ber, 1728, undertook to gather the German Lutherans
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in the rural districts into congregations, independent apparently of the Swedes; while his father, Johann Caspar Stoever, Senr, who arrived in the same month, and is said to have been ordained in Europe, is sup- posed to have started a congregation in Philadelphia, which, however, was most likely a mission of the Swedes for the Germans. Yet the younger Stoever is supposed to have been the one who baptized certain persons in Philadelphia in 1729. About this time must have begun the services among the Germans of Rev. John Eneberg, presumably ordained in Sweden, who changed his field of labor in 1730 by taking charge of the Weccacoe Church. The elder Stoever removed about 1732 to Virginia, where his subsequent career was important. The younger Stoever preached at many points, including Trappe and other places which Henkel had served, and Lancaster, Tulpehocken, &ct., taking up his residence in Earl Township in May, 1730, and applying unsuccessfully for ordination to Rev. Daniel Falckner in 1731. Following this, the Lutherans, who had been kept to their faith largely by Stoever's itinerating among them, began applying to ecclesiasti- cal bodies of the Rhine country to send ordained min- isters.
However, Rev. John Christian Schulze, ordained presumably in Germany, came to Pennsylvania about 1732, and took charge of the German Lutherans in Philadelphia, New Providence, and New Hanover, as well as at Germantown, where he promoted the build- ing of St. Michael's Church. Previous to returning to Europe to raise funds, he, on April 8, 1733, holding the service in a barn at Trappe, in the New Providence district, ordained Stoever as his successor.
In addition to serving this flock, Stoever had many congregations, beginning in September, 1733, a monthly visit to the Codorus Creek (at the site of York), and, in 1736, after intermittent services for three years at
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Lancaster, becoming the regular Pastor there. A stone church building was finished there in 1738. It had a stone altar, and bells were obtained for its steeple. To this man, of whose temper and later actions his antagonists, the Moravians and followers of Mühlen- berg, have left unpleasing accounts, was largely due the existence of a German Lutheran body in Pennsylvania and south thereof during the period of these Chronicles.
The German Consistories would not or could not send a minister without a clear understanding for his suffi- cient maintenance. So various applications for clerical supply fell through. While the Lutherans among the population at Tulpehocken were waiting for a Pastor from abroad, Casper Leutbecker, in 1734, began cate- chizing, and, having caused the erection of a parsonage, moved in, and, having explained that he had been or- dained by the Court Chaplain in London, and reported that the expected Pastor had died at sea, was chosen Pastor. Both of Leutbecker's statements became sus- pected, causing, or in the course of, a split in the con- gregation, whereby Stoever, who was an old time Lutheran, preached for the party opposed to Leut- becker (variously spelt in the records), who was a Pietist. Quarrels took place for the use of the church building: and one night, in 1738, the windows of the parsonage where Leutbecker was residing were broken. After his friends had kept watch for some nights to preserve his life, he fled, and, in a partisan's house where he took refuge, died.
When, as aforesaid, Weiss and the Stoevers were establishing congregations distinct respectively from the English-speaking Presbyterians and the Swedish Lutherans, language had become an ineradicable differ- ence between those theologically one. No longer was it necessary for every Pennsylvania farmer or me- chanic or shopkeeper to know some English words. The settlers from the Upper Rhine, if they confined
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themselves to certain neighbourhoods,-neighbourhoods greatly multiplying and spreading in certain direc- tions,-found their mother tongue sufficient. The preachers and business agents, both being obliged to travel through the province, and to talk to various races, were alone required to be linguists. When the Irish came to dwell within a few miles, the two settle- ments did not combine, and, until a generation or so ago, the people of some townships in Lancaster County could not talk with the people of one adjoining. The Swiss, Swabian, or Palatinate origin of nearly all the families taking up land during the period of these Chronicles in Berks County, in the northern part of Lan- caster County, and in the greater part of the present Montgomery County, has made the Alemannian dialect with some unavoidable modification by standard Ger- man, and with certain English words and expressions, the vernacular of so many Pennsylvanians. Its varia- tion from modern German and Dutch has caused it, as well as the people speaking it, to be called "Pennsyl- vania Dutch," the word Dutch here retaining its old signification as the translation of Deutsch, and being equivalent to High Dutch, or German, and not con- nected with Holland, the stopping-place of the immi- grants. Besides this, which we may call their Demotic, the inhabitants have used, at least to the extent of read- ing, what Luther made the literary language of Ger- many. In the latter or something very close to it, the books for them were printed, and the sermons of their better educated divines were mainly preached. In 1732, Franklin began the publication, under the editorship of Louis Timothee, of Die Philadelphische Zeitung, the earliest German newspaper printed in America. In 1738, Christoph Sauer established a printing office in Germantown to supply the wants of this race, and, in the following year, issued his first book. The Chris- topher Sower Company in still (1916) doing business.
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